Archive for the ‘Teh Stoopid’ Category

I just remembered that last night, a woman from the Deaf club near campus (I had a small typing gig there after class) intervened during a legal lecture and said that the local Rabbinate refused to acknowledge her as witness for the writing of a will by one of her own family members.

Great, just great. I just tried to access my curriculum (I have no idea where my classes are, yet, and the semester’s starting on Sunday) and I got a message telling me that the information services in BIU (Bar Ilan University) are offline through the weekend. The reason being that the university servers, apparently, are observing the Shabat.

Now, I would just like to ask: is this because of the decree that servants and slaves are (a la Deuteronomy) not allowed to work on the Shabat, then today, now that slavery is abolished, “servers” are considered to be “servants”? Maybe it’s a friggin’ typo.

Another pharyngulated blog, 2000 years of deception (hark at that), has brought to my attention a particularly obnoxious type of homeschooling, bigoted, hate-mongering, ignorant and odious individual. The bottom line is that miss God Hates Fags here says that homosexuality should be punishable by death and that with any luck some radical will blow up a “gay-friendly high-school”. She also said she doesn’t actually endorse this. Oh yeah, no sir!

Anyhow, since this is just another run-of-the-mill idiot with nothing to do but to spread tinfoil hat mouth-foaming belliigerence (and, tragically, inculcating it in her homeschooled children) – on itself it’s not big news and not particularly interesting. The only sympathizers clods like that have are other twerps with the same single-digit IQ.

However, being the comments prowler that I am, I sniffed the comments in 2000YOD (well, I’d obviously not look into the godbot’s blog for a balanced view, that despicable hag quickly deleted every comment from non-sycophants) and I ran into this jewel:

”

Anonymous said…

Flaging her blog is juvenile and close minded.

Hate Speech is still free speech. No matter how vulgar the message.

”

I’m sorry, all ye unfaithful – this anonymous chap is right. Freedom of speech logically entails freedom of dumb, hateful, poisonous speech. Freedom of speech enables Hitlers and Mussolinis, not just FDR’s and Churchills. If one accepts the right to free speech, one must also allow it for anyone with a dissenting and even disgusting view, and I fully endorse this woman’s right to display her revolting worldview to the world. At least that way more people can be made aware of this vile, sickening individual.

I’m using more expletives than usual precisely because I wish to make an example of my own free speech. See, I don’t think suppressing people’s view is a good long-term strategy for any purpose. It doesn’t even stand to reason even when we ignore the warm, fuzzy feelings liberal concepts like FOS give to us ( I’m not kidding, it’s given me warm fuzzy feelings ever since I heard of it in junior high. )

The thing is – if people have dissenting views, hushing them up won’t make them go away, and in any case, if there’s a personality or an upbringing that makes people susceptible to certain viewpoints, then shutting them up won’t make them change their minds, or change the fact that such viewpoints will survive. People always find a way, and writing about crap like said hag is just one of many methods of propagating disgusting ideas.

So my take on this is that freedom of speech does in fact and should cut both ways: it’s the right of useful, intelligent, modern human beings to express their views and to spread useful and egalitarian ideas and it’s also the right for bible-thumping yokels to dribble about how wonderful a world without people who are different than they are is going to be.

I also think that it’s solely the responsibility of sensible liberals to use that same right to vocalize their contempt, scorn, disdain, disapproval, disavowal and absolute flaming dejection at such putrid ideas.

In the end, it’s the winning ideas that win, not the most vocal ideas, though being overly vocal helps to propogate bullshit. But the end result is that people want power, and the way to power is in reason and in reason alone. If you convince enough people to use their heads and not the opinions of authoritative bigots, they will, in turn, use their heads to produce results better than they could before.

Then the tide will turn.

Speak out hard enough, and the truth will win: not because it’s warm and cuddly, but because it’s concordant with humanity’s biological reality: the truth is the best way to get to results, and only those who get to results get a say in anything.

Eventually, if enough people use their heads, the warm and fuzzy feelings (the truly important part of this whole “life” thing) will follow.

I always puzzled over what is it that Americans call “the holidays”. In Israel, it’s usually a phrase denoting the rather ghastly period at the end of September and throughout October in which an Israeli has to endure Rosh Ha’Shana, the Jewish new year, Yom Kippur, the day when you just HAVE to be sorry in, and now, last but definitely least, Sukkot.

See, it makes some sense to have a somewhat arbitrary date and base your calender on it, and commemorate in one way or another the first day in it. Of course, us Jews (speaking of those who actually buy into Jewish mythology) often sprinkle it with rituals, occult meanings and last but definitely extremely least: horrible traditional songs.

It also makes some oblique sense to have a day in which everyone in the land says “I’m sorry” and pretends to mean it simply because this day was (now definitely) arbitrarily made up by some acolyte more than 2,000 years ago.

But, as so happens in the slippery slope (read downward spiral) of the rational mind inflicted with ancient and non-amenable religion, indeed we gradually become to the most ridiculous celebration of all. Sukkot is by far a senior-ranking instance of the stupidest holidays ever to be canonized by an entire people.

The reason I’m saying all of this is because no serious archaeologist has any doubt that there was never, not even once, anything even remotely similar to the exodus event. I think the only time in history where a really large population of Jews trekked the desert areas from Palestine to Egypt was actually the other way around, when the IDF crossed the Suez canal and kicked modern, Arabian Egypt’s ass on the 6-days war.

It is, actually, far more likely that the ancient Israelites were just another bunch of desert tribesmen, and if there’s one thing that tribesmen like to do, is to make up amazing bullshit stories about their legendary past.

Sukkot is actually a still-used word in Hebrew that means “huts”. Well, not exactly huts, more like makeshift oblong yurts. Obviously, since no ancient Israelites ever built real “Sukkot” while trekking an unlikely 40-years period in the desert, no one actually ever built “the right kind of Sukkot” like the Israelites did.

This is because Exodus never really happened and it’s just a stupid, ancient myth.

As I am writing this, a Suka (singular for Sukkot) is standing erect about 15 meters away from me (I live on the first floor). I was able to witness its 30-minutes-long erection (that is the only thing I can find enviable in a Suka). It’s outlined, like most modern-Israeli-variety Sukkot, by steel or iron thin bars, nailed to each other to make a completely bare skeleton of a hut. The Suka is covered with canvas or some cheap synthetic substitute, usually adorned with Torah verses and filled with mystic artifacts with silly symbolic meanings.

A traditional, exact replica of an ancient Israeli Suka

The Sukkot are, as Christians and possibly even Muslims as well might know, a homage to the jerry-rigged huts the Israelites built in their non-existent flight from Egypt, making it quite staggeringly a nation-wide effort to build quasi-replicas of structures that never existed in the first place.

This past month is just one national insanity after another. I love my country, but sometimes I really wish I could just get out of this madhouse. The fact that millions of fellow countryman are happily conducting one stupid, inane ritual after another without even for an instance questioning or doubting it really, really gives me the creeps..

So, one of the truly most brain-numbing activities in Israel is the writing and, even more so, the reading of comments in Ynet, one of Israelies top news websites. Think of it as youtube commentors` st00pid, only 200 times st00pider.

Anyway, I commented on this article (again, Hebrew), regarding the riots in Acre, and my comment was held for moderation and was never approved.

See, it’s strange, since comments in Ynet are usually so rinsed in idiocy that it’s a mystery to me how could any person that’s so mind-bogglingly stupid can actually finish a sentence, let alone use a keyboard.

So, for some reason, they didn’t publish my comment. I was a bit harsh, I wrote that it’s fascist parliament members who promote the exile and transfer of Arab Israelies and it’s fascist Arabs who promote or defend the activities of thuggish attacks on Jews. What else would you call extreme nationalistic kooks with electoral power? Moreover, the most emphasized element of my comment was that the reason for the riots wasn’t Arab nor Jewish ethnicity – it’s just that naturally, idiots (a universal human category of people)exist on both sides of the so-called battlefield, and it’s those idiots who screw all of us over.

The point is important and in a way, should be comforting to anyone who isn’t a bigoted, hyper-nationalistic, religiously-motivated prick: the riots, the violence, the terrorism, the cruelty of the occupation – they’re not the result of the misdemeanor of the Jewish people or the Arab people per se, it’s the result of malign idiots on both sides. I guess this was simply too rough for Ynet. Amazing, since some of the comments contained phrases like “religion=drugs” and other such stupid inanities. Maybe if I formed the comment so it’d appear like all the other stupid headlines that Ynet uses which seem to enthrall the multitudes of semi-conscious drones that constitute mostly the idiots the like of which probably started the riots.

This time, I’m going to skip the usual evil atheist rants about how irrational and hypocritical Yom Kippur is and write a paragraph or two (or more) on a rather striking side effect of Yom Kippur.

Since this blog, with its 30-views-a-day-max, probably lacks any Israeli readers who probably know of this by now, I think I would probably make a few eyebrows to be raised by writing that on Yom Kippur, there is, indeed, a complete ban on driving a car or operating ANY business or shop whatsoever. Not even the workplaces/businesses/shops that are open on Saturdays are open on Yom Kippur. There’s something so powerful about this national day-of-stupid that makes everyone kowtow to it.

I spent yesterday evening (Yom Kippur begins at evening and resumes for 24 hours thereof) with my girlfriend at her place, transporting myself between my city and hers on my bicycle, since car-driving is not allowed on Yom Kippur (unless you really like being mobbed to death by angry, hungry neighbors).

Cycling “inter-state” is not new to me, I often cycled to Tel-Aviv and back and even further than that. It’s always a treat and with the pro-bike I have, it’s often a lot faster than a car in rush-hour. This time, however, it was extremely annoying. The streets last night were festered with bright-eyed prepubescent idiots and their unwary parents, apparently very much aware of a lot of inane aspirations barring keeping their tiny eyes on the road infront of them and not, as so often happens, ending sunny side up on the kerb.

Now, now. It’s not that I hate kids. I just hate it when a few thousands kids get on bikes and start cycling around without being precautious. It’s this whole inane ritual every year that, since there’s apparently insufficient supervision of this “bicycle-holiday”. Hundreds of kids all around Israel are injured and sometimes even admitted every year. It’s as though the silliness of not drinking nor eating for adults makes them envious of their children. (don’t mind not eating for a day, but not drinking? Shit, that’s stupid!). Apparently, there’s some jealous incentive to make sure kids suffer on Yom Kippur too.

But this is, really, not that striking side effect I wanted to write about. Cycling back home today (gotta get back to work, and I’m STILL procrastinating), I cycled the freeway, almost entirely by myself barring the occasional cycler (most of the cyclers congregate in urban areas. I guess their parents can’t walk so much without eating or drinking).

Cycling around the freeway, above bridges and entirely in the open, the wind finally unhindered by thousands of cars and now fully rampant and extremely resistent to my efforts to cycle through it, I actually found myself at awe of this human endeavor to completely cease all productive activity for 24 hours.

In a free society, it’s probably for the better that every person rests (and definitely atones!) on his own free time or when the time is right, but to see the roads entirely empty, whole streets deserted, ground-zeroish silence plaguing the streets and boulevards that are simply always buzzing with activity – that is simply wondrous and quite breath-taking.

If this occasion or holiday or whatever it is that Jews want to call it was a celebration of, oh, I don’t know, just our ability to walk on our legs for once without polluting the earth, or a national day of complete and utter repose, including, for some reason, not using cars – I think it’d be a great idea, or at least a nice party-game for the entire nation.

It’s just so fucked up that us Israelies have to couple almost everything pretty with some stupid and irrational conjunction.

It’s FUN to cycle, it’s good to rest every now and then, it’s simply breath-taking to be enveloped in silence in a world filled with architecture.

Ironically, it is for this reason that I love Yom Kippur more than any other Jewish holiday. This doesn’t lack the same dose of st00p1d that all the other holidays do, but at least on Yom Kippur I get to actually appreciate the country I live in in a different, more natural light.